Annotated Bibliography: Public Health Psychology Sources

Introduction to the Annotated Bibliography

The following annotated bibliography reviews three peer-reviewed sources in the field of public health psychology, examining their contributions, limitations, and practical implications for understanding health equity, behavioral medicine, and mental health literacy.

Public Health and Public Safety: Converging Upstream

Gourevitch, M. N., Kleiman, N., Brodsky, K., & Falco, K. (2022, April 13). Public health and public safety: Converging upstream. American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), 112(5), 716–718.

The COVID-19 epidemic has reinforced the need for increased public safety as well as improved public health. It has made policymakers and providers alike more conscious of the need for health equality, given the unequal ways in which the burden of the pandemic was shouldered by persons of different occupations, income levels, and communities. The spotlight turned on police brutality in the media has also highlighted inequalities in policing and public safety. Health is not merely an absence of disease; it is also defined as a sense of physical, mental, and social well-being. Similarly, safety is not merely the absence of crime. The article calls for a reevaluation of concepts of public health in relation to public safety and equality, and calls for an understanding of how poverty, unequal access to education and opportunity, housing, and other inequalities can give rise to poorer health outcomes, including mental stress.

This is an article from a peer-reviewed journal, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). However, it makes rather broad connections between crime, public health and safety, health equality, and other issues that may be beyond the immediate scope and expertise of the authors. While it is true that the pandemic and police violence may be disproportionately felt by specific communities — and this can generate negative psychological as well as physical outcomes due to perceptions of a lack of security — this specific article does not offer hard statistical evidence to justify these conclusions.

The source is helpful in drawing attention to the fact that while the United States spends more on both healthcare and policing than comparable industrialized nations, its outcomes are poorer, and poor attention to public health can generate mental stress for disadvantaged communities. It provides a broad philosophical overview of social injustices in health and safety. It is difficult to draw meaningful policy implications from the article beyond the fact that it highlights a problem and advances a definition of health and safety that goes beyond the mere absence of specific, targeted problems.

Health Psychology: Where Are We and Where Do We Go From Here?

Kaplan, R. M. (2009). Health psychology: Where are we and where do we go from here? Mens Sana Monographs, 7(1), 3–9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3151453/

This article highlights the fact that human behavior and human psychology can play a significant role in preventing death across a number of illnesses. There is a need to use biosocial models of treatment rather than solely focusing on the physical aspects of disease. Health psychology often overlaps with the field of behavioral medicine. One example cited by the article is tobacco use. Even though knowledge of the negative health effects of tobacco is widespread, that knowledge alone is not sufficient to produce social health improvements. Behavioral modifications, public health communications, and public health decisions informed by psychology have all been needed in combination to reduce overall tobacco use. Although heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have other causes — including genetic ones — reducing tobacco use has produced significant public health gains by targeting behavioral issues from a health psychology standpoint at the social level.

This article, although it covers a number of broad public health issues, is significant because of its ongoing applications. Health cannot be addressed on a purely physical basis, because it has lived applications in people's daily lives. People must make sound choices on a personal basis; on the other hand, those good choices must be actively supported. The article does address the need for better collaboration between mental and physical health clinicians, but does not adequately address the role of alleviating poverty and improving access to mental and physical health supportive services in treating disease.

While this article addresses an important issue — namely, the need for better collaboration among health psychology experts and the assessment of health psychology to improve patient outcomes and quality of life — it needs to more fully address the role of economics and healthcare access in shaping patient perceptions of the need for care. It does address gender disparities in quality of care and the need for better documentation of those disparities, but only at the very end of the article. It also does not address how such disparities can result in economic and occupational discrimination due to reduced access to quality healthcare.